Too often today campaign reporting has become, in a word, gruesome. That's tied to the point I made in last week's column about the 2008 campaign running interminably long at 22 months. It's not just the length of the marathon, or the fact that almost nobody outside the Beltway Bubble is paying close attention to the grapefruit league machinations taking place on the field right now. It's that it pains me to contemplate the amount of bad journalism that's going to be produced during that very long stretch of time. Clownish coverage of the Kerry speech simply confirms my worst fears that large portions of the political press corps (with their "eye-rolling superiority," as the Daily Howler weblog put it) no longer take politics, or presidential campaigns, seriously.

How else to explain the fact that MSNBC's Carlson not only made up facts about Kerry crying on the Senate floor but then suggested it would have been best if, as in the final scene from Of Mice and Men, somebody simply took a gun and shot Kerry as a mercy killing. "Just blow[] him into the next world," as Carlson put it.